Authors: L. Fletcher Prouty
ISBN-13: 9781602397316, ISBN-10: 1602397317
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Date Published: November 2009
Edition: (Non-applicable)
L. Fletcher Prouty (1917-2001), a retired colonel of the U.S. Air Force, served as the chief of special operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Kennedy years. He was directly in charge of the global system designed to provide military support for the clandestine activities of the CIA. He was also the author of The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies.
Jesse Ventura is the former governor of Minnesota and author of several bestselling books, including Don’t Start the Revolution Without Me! He lives in Dellwood, Minnesota and Baja, Mexico.
The story of the man who inspired Oliver Stone’s JFK.
Prouty, who was a Washington insider for nearly 20 years--in the last few of them as Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Kennedy--has a highly unusual perspective to offer on the assassination and the events that led up to it. Familiar to moviegoers as the original of the anonymous Washington figure, played by Donald Sutherland in the Oliver Stone's movie JFK , who asks hero Jim Garrison to ponder why Kennedy was killed, Prouty leaves no doubt where he stands. The president, he claims, had angered the military-industrial establishment with his procurement policies and his determination to withdraw from Vietnam, and had threatened to break the CIA into ``a thousand pieces'' after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. His death was in effect a coup d'etat that placed in the White House a very different man with a very different approach--one much more acceptable to what Prouty consistently calls ``the power elite.'' Although he declares that such an elite has operated, supranationally, throughout history, and is all-powerful, he never satisfactorily explains who its members are and how it functions--or how it has allowed the current East-West rapprochement to take place. Still, this behind-the-scenes look at how the CIA has shaped postwar U.S. foreign policy is fascinating, as are Prouty's telling questions about the security arrangements in Dallas, his knowledge of the extraordinary government movements at that time (every member of the Cabinet was out of the country when Kennedy was shot) and his perception that most of the press has joined in the cover-up ever since. Photos not seen by PW. (Sept.)
Introduction: The Secret History of the United States (1943-90) | ||
Preface | ||
1 | The Role of the Intelligence Services in the Cold War: 1945-65, the Vietnam Era | 1 |
2 | The CIA in the World on the H. Bomb | 20 |
3 | The Invisible Third World War | 29 |
4 | Vietnam: The Opening Wedge | 42 |
5 | The CIA's Saigon Military Mission | 51 |
6 | Genocide by Transfer - in South Vietnam | 70 |
7 | Why Vietnam? The Selection and Preparation of the Battlefield | 81 |
8 | The Battlefield and the Tactics, Courtesy CIA | 102 |
9 | The CIA in the Days of Camelot | 118 |
10 | JFK and the Thousand Days to Dallas | 136 |
11 | The Battle for Power: Kennedy Versus the CIA | 153 |
12 | Building to the Final Confrontation | 170 |
13 | The Magic Box, Trigger of the Expanded War in Vietnam | 189 |
14 | JFK Makes His Move to Control the CIA | 203 |
15 | The Erosion of National Sovereignty | 219 |
16 | Government by Coup d'Etat | 232 |
17 | JFK's Plan to end the Vietnam Warfare | 246 |
18 | Setting the Stage for the Death of JFK | 266 |
19 | Visions of a Kennedy Dynasty | 286 |
20 | LBJ Takes the Helm as the Course Is Reversed | 312 |
21 | Game Plan of the High Cabal | 334 |
Afterword: Stone's JFK and the Conspiracy | 347 | |
Acknowledgments | 356 | |
Notes | 357 | |
Index | 369 |